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I've currently got a Meta Quest 3 on order to replace my rather-heavily used ~Oculus~ Meta Quest 2, and been thinking more about the future of VR given the recent announcements. It seems likely to be a great piece of hardware, but I'm less sure on the software front and as far as Meta's focus and marketing strategies go.

The mostly-negatives

What business audience?

The first thing I found weird about Meta Connect was the type of application that sometimes got focused on. Office 365 got mentioned not once, but multiple times. Probably the last thing that I think I'd put on a VR headset for at the moment would be to write a document in Microsoft Word. There may eventually be a market for some sort of productivity tools focusing on collaboration, but at the moment I'm not sure that I see much of an advantage to using the existing tools in VR.

Nice hardware but really bad UI

Overall Meta seems to have focused quite a bit on hardware which I wouldn't call a bad thing¹, but they seem to be surprisingly bad at building a user interface.

For example, there's New Quest Update Reimagines the Landing Page, Once Again Sequestering Your App Library. I have a couple of applications pinned to my launcher but other than that it's surprisingly hard to find applications you have installed to launch them. They started off badly, eventually allowed you to make the default view of your application library the set of installed applications rather than the entirety of those you own, but now appear to have removed this again. In order to launch a non-pinned application I current have to select app library, then either:

1. Type in the name of the application (not as quick in VR as with a physical keyboard)

or

2. Go to filters. Selected installed. Scroll past the list of useless crap that Meta has gradually been making mandatory installs and hope amidst the clutter that you don't overlook the application you're hoping to find.

Something as simple as making the default app library view the list of installed apps and allowing you to have them sorted by recency by default would already be a great improvement. Similarly allowing me to delete apps they've forced upon me would be great. (At the moment they don't even allowed you to delete demos from your library, even if you've purchased the title in question. e.g. I have the Beat Saber demo cluttering up my app library even though the full version of that was one of my very first app purchases for the headset).

Similarly, in the latest Quest firmware it seems there's no longer any visible way to resize application windows, though this seems like incredibly-basic functionality for a platform that (over-)targets the enterprise market.

I should note that the bad-UI is mostly criticism of the launcher and other Meta-controlled elements. Once you actually get an app to launch the user-interfaces of the applications themselves are usually fairly good.

The mostly-positives

Does Meta realize it's a gaming company? If so what kind?

I've mentioned that Meta seems to confusingly put a lot of emphasis on enterprise customers where I think that there's much more opportunity in the gaming sector. But this is something that Meta seems quite confused about, even as far as what types of games might work with VR.

In one of the more prominent announcements - itself a seeming reannouncement of what was already announced last year, now with a firmer December timeline is that Xbox Game Pass is coming to the headset. I actually think that there's some value here, but one of their most prominent announcements was regarding 2D gaming rather than something inherent to VR².

The article I don’t think Meta knows it’s a game company had the following to say:

And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it’s kind of ignoring that core gamer audience and not doing a whole lot to build it. Beat Saber, arguably VR’s killer app, is four years old, and no other VR game has really captured the zeitgeist in a similar fashion. People don’t see their friends play admittedly great games like Pistol Whip and run out and buy a Quest 2.

... Steam and Sony are both very aware that killer AAA game experiences are necessary for a VR platform. That’s why we’ve got excellent titles like Half-Life: Alyx and Horizon Call of the Mountain. They’re invested in the software as much as the hardware. Meta isn’t.

In the months since that article came out it feels like Sony's largely abandoned the PSVR2. Hopefully that doesn't happen with the Quest 3 gaming market, but only time will tell.

Custom content created by 3rd parties for rhythm games is generally enough to keep the platform feeling fresh to me though. Take a game like Synth Riders for Quest and you have roughly a hundred songs officially available, but several thousand available as custom content:

(Weirdly the Meta-owned Beat Saber is amongst the worst rhythm games on Quest as far as it's support for custom content goes.

Is standalone the way to go?

With traditional VR you would need to have a fairly powerful PC available to run your VR games, rather than only requiring a single device. It wasn't something you could do if someone else wanted to use the PC, as might be the case for a lot of families³. Overall I think that choice to go standalone has been a good one, as the market seems to agree:

PCVR players, we aren’t haters. We made Ultrawings 2 thinking of you FIRST! It’s true! But the reality is the Q2 version has made close to 10x what the PCVR has made. That’s just the truth. Players have spoken. Stand-alone VR Is far more successful than PCVR.

— Bit Planet Games (@BitPlanetGames) July 24, 2022

The downside is that graphics are a little more limited, though as standalone hardware improves I think they're generally adequate.

9 yo asked for a Wii for Christmas. It's surprising how lame the graphics seem; 2006 wasn't that long ago. But he loves playing these games anyway. The fun of playing a game doesn't scale anything like linearly with computing power.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 15, 2022

That sentiment is one that I'd agree with. As long as the games are fun I think they'll do well, though thus far a lot of VR games have been quite short. Hopefully that's changing though as the power of standalone VR grows. e.g. I think that Asgard's Wrath 2 has been estimated at providing 40-60 hours of gameplay.

Only time will tell if more such titles come to the platform. For me at least I think the Quest 3 will be quite a bit of fun. (A slight change in Meta's focus and an tweaks to the UI I think could help substantially).

‘What would you do if you were me, doctor?’: randomised trial of psychiatrists' personal v. professional perspectives on treatment recommendations

"Psychiatrists choosing treatment for themselves predominantly selected other treatments ... than what psychiatrists recommended to patients when asked in the ‘regular recommendation role’"

Common Cents: Bank Account Structure and Couples’ Relationship Dynamics

"we investigated whether randomly assigning engaged or newlywed couples to merge their money in a joint bank account increases relationship quality over time. Whereas couples assigned to keep their money in separate accounts or to a no-intervention condition exhibited the normative decline in relationship quality across the first 2 years of marriage, couples assigned to merge money in a joint account sustained strong relationship quality throughout."

Pulling Back the Curtain on Suicide Research: Understanding why people die by suicide is a harder problem to solve than most social scientists admit

"there is scant evidence that most suicide prevention strategies are effective, and the public doesn’t know"

Tomas Pueyo on Twitter

A rather long thread on societal trends in loneliness and being alone that's rather interesting. If there's a summary tweet it'd be this one: "So what's happening? Ppl are mixing loneliness with aloneness. We are spending more time alone. But this is not making us lonelier. We like it! There isn't a loneliness epidemic. It's always been there. We should fight it, but it's not new, so it's not due to social media"

Consider this tweet:

Ignorance can blind us; the paradox is so can expertise

The author is, as you'd know if you clicked the link, David Dunning, a person whose name people are probably more likely to have heard of in a different context. Similarly you see this in an article he wrote with Kaidi Wu,

To suffer from hypercognition is to over-apply a familiar concept to circumstances where it does not belong. ... who are most likely to fall prey to hypercognition? Experts. Experts who are confined by their own expertise. Experts who overuse the constricted set of concepts salient in their own profession while neglecting a broader array of equally valid concepts.

I was once debating trying to write a longer post on how Dunning's views don't quite seem to match how his name gets employed by a lot of activists. It's a little interesting, e.g., to consider Dunning's views on gender and over-confidence. e.g. when he did a Reddit ask-me-anything he was asked:

Is the Dunning-Kruger effect influenced by gender?

Dunning's response is slightly different from what I think a lot of people might expect:

Yes, but not in a straight line way. Men and women will tend toward overconfidence in tasks stereotypically associated with their gender, and underconfidence in tasks associated with the other gender.

(I'm tempted to further contextualize this but trying to stick to Dunning here).

One person I originally stumbled across via the Effective Altruism community, made a Case for rare Chinese tofus, and has a book releasing in a few hours, where the Kindle version is surprisingly cheap, at least in my region.

Looking at his views in the original post where I encountered him, I'd try sum up his case for a different approach to cuisine as follows:

To a large degree, American omnivores object to vegan food because it’s reductionary, focused on subtraction (i.e. chicken-less chicken salads) and substitution (i.e. inferior alt proteins). For most consumers, these foods taste chronically worse than the originals. ... To go mainstream, vegan cuisine should explore moving beyond reduction–basing itself off meat–towards creation–leveraging culinary strengths of plant-based ingredients to build all new foods.

What's he's interested in is not "tofu" as many people seem to think of it but as a broader category:

In 2021, a team of chefs and I researched how to create new foods and found a simple yet effective formula: cross rare Chinese tofus with traditional, western cooking methods.

In the west, tofu is often seen as an ingredient, but it's actually a category of ingredients, like chicken. In China, the birthplace and mecca of tofu, there are over 25 distinct types, which are as dissimilar as chicken feet from chicken breast. The most common types of tofu in the States–firm, soft, and silken–are like chicken feet; while popular in Asia, they are poor fits for western cooking methods and taste preferences. In contrast, there are other varieties that while rare in Asia are great fits–like chicken breast.

He also looks at why views of tofu in China may be counterproductive and actually looks as promoting alternative tofus in Western cuisine as a way to make them more popular there:

In China, tofu is a symbol of poverty —a relic from when ordinary people couldn’t afford meat. As such, ordering tofu for guests is often seen as cheap and disrespectful. This “shame” drags heavily on tofu consumption and elevates the status of meat. If tofu became prized in the west, however, I think these perceptions would change.

In some ways he thinks that there are broader reasons why he thinks he could be influential:

Hardly anyone knows about these ingredients, and the few people who do don’t have incentives to share them. Because tofu is seen as a cultural relic of poverty, there is no central authority that surveys and promotes them. Rare tofus are spread out across China, most often in remote inland villages, making surveying even harder. Local producers have very low social status, so aren’t taken seriously. Practicing Han Buddhists, China’s largest block of vegetarians, are generally no more knowledgeable: a) they live clustered around China’s southeast, a region with very few rare tofus; b) in addition to not eating meat, Chinese Buddhists avoid alliums (garlic, onions, chives, etc.), which is present in >90% of Chinese foods; this means that even when Buddhists visit inland areas, they can't eat the local plant-based foods, so have little knowledge of the proteins. Historically,* western Chinese immigrant communities have come from Guangdong (Cantonese) and Fujian (Fujianese) communities, which again use very few rare tofus.* U.S. tofu producers aren’t from in-land China, don’t understand those rare tofus, and don’t know how to market them to western chefs. Because of the above reasons, western vegans also have little knowledge of vegan Chinese food and rare Chinese tofus.

As he argues elsewhere "The most distinct vegan Chinese foods come from culturally and economically isolated regions", and even the biggest US consumers of tofu aren't likely to know too much about them.

Will he be successful? I'm not quite sure. What makes me mildly optimistic is his experience at the CIA - the culinary version not the intelligence community one. On a day wherein he describes so much going wrong some things also seemed to go right:

Our Shanghai tofu soup was met with an affection reserved for chicken noodle. The fried cannoli reminded one attendee of the startlingly delicious “bell” rolls she had tasted in Singapore hotpot. The fermented tofus were shocking. Especially the rose red and chili oil variants.

As we sampled the different flavors, it hit me… oh shit! I never added tofu any to our cherry tomato sauce!! I immediately folded some in, wincing as the others leaned in for a taste.

But when I looked up, my host’s face was in sublime disbelief. I will never forget her expression, seemingly questioning how… why… and what the hell!

When I tasted the dish, I joined her in disbelief. It was so damn good.

“You want to bring this stuff to Eleven Madison Park?” I joked, knowing she was externing at the 3 Michelin star eatery next term.

“Yes.” Still confused, she sounded solemn.

Or to quote another attendee:

“We’re so tired of produce! And extra-firm tofu!” Cynthia was adamant. “You’re opening my mind!”

Will you start seeing tofu in Michelin star cuisine? I'm not quite sure, but I suspect Stiffman's efforts are at least making that a more-significant possibility.

(On a different note, I didn't notice any server downtime yet so it's possible that the outage is still to come as part of a rolling upgrade of the servers instead of tackling each at the same time).